In the two months where I have been living now I have seen as many warnings about ”wet floor” and ”slippery ground” as I had until then in my entire life. And I’m not that young.

Given the amount of these warnings all over makes me think that the message is: “Yes, we know that you may tilt and hurt yourself. Actually we don’t care and we don’t intend to do anything about it. But at least now you can’t say, that we didn’t warn you”.

It also makes me think about what is being done about poor data quality all over. There are lots of warnings out there and lots of ways and methodology available about how to measure bad data. But when it comes to actually doing something to solve the problems, well, warning signs seems to be the most preferred remedy.

This very much strikes home for me. Some time back, I shephered an ETL effort involving imports of data from external partners. I strongly advocated for an error reporting mechanism (and built the framework for same “under the radar”) but the reporting piece was deferred – until an unannounced file format change by one partner caused most of our imported records to fail validation, based on a required column being empty.

Subsequently, error reporting was put in queue, but not before an annoyed customer needed placating.